Tom
Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly
punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car
customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works
like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right
Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan
hospital. He was 88.

His death was
confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been
hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining
The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

In
his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe,
beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid
known as the New Journalism.

But as
an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as
his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison
Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his
spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a
starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast
pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to
describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It
was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in
lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a
penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which —
like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms.

His
talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his
verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his
meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive
punctuation.

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“As
a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,”
Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is
normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo,
as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word
‘hernia’ 57 times.”

William F.
Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is
probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do
more things with words than anyone else.”

From
1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California
with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of
LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best
account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the
’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the
Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.

Mr.
Wolfe, second from left, at New York magazine in 1967 with, from left,
George Hirsch, Gloria Steinem, Clay Felker, Peter Maas, Jimmy Breslin
and Milton Glaser.CreditPhotograph by Jill Krementz; all rights reserved

Even
more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his
exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and
the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with a
cast that included Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the
test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to
the English language. It won the National Book Award.

At
the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and
magazine pieces for New York, Harper’s and Esquire. His theory of
literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who
would listen was that journalism and nonfiction had “wiped out the novel
as American literature’s main event.”

After
“The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the
question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of
experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you
merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?”

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’

The
answer came with “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Published initially as a
serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after
extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture
of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless
excesses of the 1980s.

The action
jumps back and forth from Park Avenue to Wall Street to the terrifying
holding pens in Bronx Criminal Court, after the Yale-educated bond
trader Sherman McCoy (a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”)
becomes lost in the Bronx at night in his Mercedes with his foxy young
mistress, Maria. After the car, with Maria at the wheel, runs over a
black man and nearly ignites a race riot, Sherman enters the nightmare
world of the criminal justice system.

Although
a runaway best seller, “Bonfire” divided critics into two camps: those
who praised its author as a worthy heir of his fictional idols Balzac,
Zola, Dickens and Dreiser, and those who dismissed the book as clever
journalism, a charge that would dog him throughout his fictional career.

Mr.
Wolfe responded with a manifesto in Harper’s, “Stalking the
Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he lambasted American fiction for
failing to perform the time-honored sociological duty of reporting on
the facts of contemporary life, in all their complexity and variety.

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His
second novel, “A Man in Full” (1998), also a whopping commercial
success, was another sprawling social panorama. Set in Atlanta, it
charted the rise and fall of Charlie Croker, a 60-year-old former
Georgia Tech football star turned millionaire real estate developer.

“Extraordinarily
good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility
that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer,” Norman Mailer
wrote in The New York Review of Books. “How grateful one can feel then
for his failures and his final inability to be great — his absence of
truly large compass. There may even be an endemic inability to look into
the depth of his characters with more than a consummate journalist’s
eye.”

“Tom may be the hardest-working
show-off the literary world has ever owned,” Mr. Mailer continued. “But
now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives
in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers — he is already a Media
Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few
can do that or allow themselves to do that.”

Two
years later, Mr. Wolfe took revenge. In an essay titled “My Three
Stooges,” included in his 2001 collection, “Hooking Up,” he wrote that
his eminent critics had clearly been “shaken” by “A Man in Full” because
it was an “intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that
plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right
now,” and it signaled the new direction in late-20th- and
early-21st-century literature and would soon make many prestigious
artists, “such as our three old novelists, appear effete and
irrelevant.”

And, he added, “It must gall them a bit that everyone — even them — is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.”

Cocky
words from a man best known for his gentle manner and unfailing
courtesy in person. For many years Mr. Wolfe lived a relatively private
life in his 12-room apartment on the Upper East Side with his wife,
Sheila (Berger) Wolfe, a graphic designer and former art director of
Harper’s Magazine, whom he married when he was 48 years old. She and
their two children, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street
Journal, and Tommy Wolfe, a sculptor and furniture designer, survive
him.

Every morning he dressed in one
of his signature outfits — a silk jacket, say, and double-breasted white
vest, shirt, tie, pleated pants, red-and-white socks and white shoes —
and sat down at his typewriter. Every day he set himself a quota of 10
pages, triple-spaced. If he finished in three hours, he was done for the
day.

“If it takes me 12 hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it,” he told George Plimpton in a 1991 interview for The Paris Review.

For
many summers the Wolfes rented a house in Southampton, N.Y., where Mr.
Wolfe continued to observe his daily writing routine as well as the
fitness regimen from which he rarely faltered. In 1996 he suffered a
heart attack at his gym and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. A period
of severe depression followed, which Charlie Croker relived, in
fictional form, in “A Man in Full.”

As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”

“I
found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,”
he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village
information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know.
Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who
want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you
don’t know.”

The eccentricities of his adult life were a far cry from the normalcy of his childhood, which by all accounts was a happy one.

A Professor’s Son

Thomas
Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Va. His
father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
editor of The Southern Planter,
an agricultural journal, and director of distribution for the Southern
States Cooperative, which later became a Fortune 500 Company. His
mother, Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, encouraged him to
become an artist and gave him a love of reading.

Young
Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated
cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s
degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with
the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.

Image

Tom
Wolfe in 2016 at the New York Public Library’s gala commemorating the
50th anniversary of Truman Capote’s “Black and White Ball.”CreditErin Baiano for The New York Times

He
enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and
received his Ph.D. in 1957. After sending out job applications to more
than 100 newspapers and receiving three responses, two of them “no,” he
went to work as a general-assignment reporter at The Springfield Union
in Springfield, Mass., and later joined the staff of The Washington
Post. He was assigned to cover Latin America and in 1961 won an award
for a series on Cuba.

In
1962, Mr. Wolfe joined The Herald Tribune as a reporter on the city
desk, where he found his voice as a social chronicler. Fascinated by the
status wars and shifting power bases of the city, he poured his energy
and insatiable curiosity into his reporting and soon became one of the
stars on the staff. The next year he began writing for New York, the
newspaper’s newly revamped Sunday supplement, edited by Clay Felker.

“Together
they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered
story of the age: the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice
of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the
world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in “The Paper: The Life and
Death of the New York Herald Tribune” (1986).

Those
were heady days for journalists. Mr. Wolfe became one of the
standard-bearers of the New Journalism, along with Jimmy Breslin, Gay
Talese, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and others. Most were represented
in “The New Journalism” (1973), an anthology he edited with E. W.
Johnson.

In an author’s statement for
the reference work World Authors, Mr. Wolfe wrote that to him the term
“meant writing nonfiction, from newspaper stories to books, using basic
reporting to gather the material but techniques ordinarily associated
with fiction, such as scene-by-scene construction, to narrate it.”

He
added, “In nonfiction I could combine two loves: reporting and the
sociological concepts American Studies had introduced me to, especially
status theory as first developed by the German sociologist Max Weber.”

It was the perfect showcase for his own extravagant and inventive style, increasingly on display in Esquire, for which he began writing during the 1963 New York City newspaper strike.

One
of his most dazzling essays for Esquire, about the subculture of car
customizers in Los Angeles, started out as a 49-page memo to Byron
Dobell, his editor there, who simply deleted the words “Dear Byron” at
the top of the page and ran it as is. It became the title essay in Mr.
Wolfe’s first collection, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline
Baby,” published in 1968.

“Girl
of the Year,” his 1964 portrait of the Manhattan “it” girl Baby Jane
Holzer, opened with the literary equivalent of a cinematic pan shot at a
Rolling Stones concert:

‘Radical Chic’ Skewered

In
June 1970, New York magazine devoted an entire issue to “These Radical
Chic Evenings,” Mr. Wolfe’s 20,000-word sendup of a fund-raiser given
for the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New
York Philharmonic, and his wife, the Chilean actress Felicia
Montealegre, in their 13-room Park Avenue penthouse duplex — an affair
attended by scores of the Bernsteins’ liberal, rich and mostly famous
friends.

“Do Panthers like little
Roquefort cheese morsels rolled on crushed nuts this way, and asparagus
tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of
which are at the very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver
platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?,” Mr.
Wolfe wrote, outraging liberals and Panthers alike.

When
a Time reporter asked a minister for the Black Panthers to comment on
the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s account, he said, “You mean that dirty,
blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in
New York magazine?”

The article was included in Mr. Wolfe’s essay collection “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” published in 1970.

Storms
did not seem to bother Mr. Wolfe, as his forays into the art world
demonstrated. He had always had an interest in art and was indeed an
artist himself, sometimes illustrating his work with pen-and-ink
drawings. He was a contributing artist at Harper’s from 1978 to 1981 and
exhibited his work on occasion at Manhattan galleries. Many of his
illustrations were collected in “In Our Time” (1980).

Earlier,
in “The Painted Word” (1975), he produced a gleeful screed denouncing
contemporary art as a con job perpetrated by cultural high priests,
notably the critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo
Steinberg — “the kings of cultureburg,” as he called them.

The art world, en masse, rejected the argument, and the book, with disdain.

“If
someone who is tone-deaf goes to Carnegie Hall every night of the year,
he is, of course, entitled to his opinion of what he has listened to,
just as a eunuch is entitled to his opinion of sex,” the art critic John
Russell wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

Undeterred,
in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture
and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings.
Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics.
“The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review,
“is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.”

Mr.
Wolfe’s later novels earned mixed reviews. Many critics found “I Am
Charlotte Simmons” (2004), about a naïve freshman’s disillusioning
experiences at a liberal arts college fueled by sex and alcohol,
unconvincing and out of touch. In “Back to Blood” (2012), Mr. Wolfe
created one of his most sympathetic, multidimensional characters in
Nestor Camacho, a young Cuban-American police officer trying to navigate
the treacherous waters of multiethnic Miami.

In
the end it was his ear — acute and finely tuned — that served him best
and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his
considerable writing talent.

“There
is this about Tom,” Mr. Dobell, Mr. Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, told the
London newspaper The Independent in 1998. “He has this unique gift of
language that sets him apart as Tom Wolfe. It is full of hyperbole; it
is brilliant; it is funny, and he has a wonderful ear for how people
look and feel.

“He has a gift of fluency that pours out of him the way Balzac had it.”

Correction:May 15, 2018

An
earlier version of this obituary misstated Mr. Wolfe’s age and birth
date. He was 88, not 87, and he was born on March 2, 1930, not 1931. The
earlier version also misstated the title of a novel he published in
2004. It is “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” not “I Am Charlotte Curtis.”

Correction:May 15, 2018

An
earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Mr. Wolfe’s
book “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” It was his third
essay collection, not his second.

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